Intro

Introduction

This report lays groundwork for a new approach to
understanding the massive transformations currently underway in how people
create, share, and dispute knowledge. We explore some of the major questions
that need to be addressed if these changes are to reach their full potential,
and the types of inquiries they will require. We seek to inspire new ways of
thinking around issues that have been obscured by older approaches and
assumptions – some of them in the process of being undermined and remade by the
very forces described here. Our report is at the same time a manifesto and an
unfinished agenda, a statement and a provocation we hope will inspire others to
further investigation.

Enormous transformations have occurred over the last 20
years in our systems for generating, sharing, and disputing human knowledge.
Changes associated with Internet technologies — such as social media, “big
data,” open source software, ubiquitous computing, and Wikipedia — have altered
the basic mechanics by which knowledge is produced and circulated. Remarkable
new knowledge practices have emerged, captured under the language of
crowdsourcing, cyberinfrastructure, personal informatics, citizen science, open
access, MOOCs, and dozens of other terms that wouldn’t have shown up in the
Wikipedia pages (!!) of a decade ago; academic studies of some of these
phenomena have become virtual scholarly fields unto themselves. Knowledge
institutions like universities, libraries, and government agencies (and increasingly
private entities like Facebook, Google, and Twitter) have begun to adjust,
opening up vast stores of anonymized data to analysis and exploitation,
engaging users and publics in new ways, and in some cases rethinking logics and
practices that have been decades if not centuries in the making.

These developments have emerged in part from deliberate
strategies on the part of funders and policymakers. For example, National
Science Foundation programs including Knowledge and Distributed Intelligence
(late 1990s), the Digital Libraries Initiative (late 1990s to early 2000s),
Information Technology Research (early 2000s), the Office of
Cyberinfrastructure (mid 2000s), and Human and Social Dynamics (late 2000s)
encouraged researchers to experiment with new modes of knowledge production and
dissemination, as well as to study how such forms emerge. The Sloan Foundation
(and others) funded important scientific initiatives, such as the Sloan Digital
Sky Survey, that exploited these new modes. Finally, the Obama Administration’s
data.gov initiative represents the latest in
a series of experiments in opening government databases to use by
non-governmental entities.

Such has been the power of the Internet, both as a new
medium and as a metaphor for knowledge, that much of the research surrounding
these phenomena has attended mainly to two principal axes of change: first,
technical systems and standards (computers and networks, of course, but also
metadata, federated data systems, and middleware), and second, new modes of
analyzing social (re)organization that exploit the extensive traces left behind
by users of information technology. Major, related social and institutional
changes in knowledge infrastructure include at least the following:

·Education:the rise of for-profit and online
universities; open courseware; massively open online courses; a generalized
crisis of traditional pedagogies

This list — which could easily be far longer — makes clear
that we are living through a period of fundamental transformations that
profoundly challenge our understanding of the basic processes by which
knowledge is created, debated, and spread.

This challenge is of more than intellectual concern. The
institutions in which most knowledge workers live and labor have not kept pace,
or have done so piecemeal, without a long-term vision or a strategy. For
example, the widespread excitement about crowdsourced knowledge, assembled by
unpaid individuals who volunteer their time out of personal interest, ignores
the fact that most knowledge workers’ salaries are still paid by
bricks-and-mortar organizations with hierarchical structures, established
institutional cultures, systems of credit and compensation, and other “sticky”
processes and routines. Similarly, our educational systems, libraries,
publishers, news organizations, intellectual property structures, and political
mechanisms have struggled to match or adapt to the changing information
environment (Borgman 2007).
The result is a patchwork of unsatisfactory kludges, contradictions, and
inconsistencies that may undermine the prospects for change.

Popular attention and academic research on changing
knowledge systems has tended to follow the new, fast-moving, and dramatic parts
of the current transition. For example, in Reinventing
Discovery, Nielsen (2012)
extrapolates from current events to the eventual rise of a scientific culture
of “extreme openness” where “all information of scientific value, from raw
experimental data and computer code to all the questions, ideas, folk
knowledge, and speculations that are currently locked up inside the heads of
individual scientists” is moved onto the network, “in forms that are not just
human-readable, but also machine-readable, as part of a data web.” Shirky (2010)
argues that a “cognitive surplus” will permit massively distributed
contributions to the analysis of information and the production of new
knowledge. While surely partially correct, these breathless assessments too often
lose track of crucial questions about the complex processes of mutual
adjustment by which older knowledge institutions adapt to emergent ones, and
vice versa. Charmed by the novelty of the first date, they miss the complexity
of the marriage that ensues: the dynamics of scale, time, and adjustment by
which new practices emerge.

We think the time has come to reconceive our object(s) of
interest around the idea of knowledge infrastructures.[1]
To help configure this interest, we posed three themes for workshop
participants to deliberate:

1. How are knowledge infrastructures changing?

2.How do
knowledge infrastructures reinforce or

redistribute authority, influence, power
and control?

3.How can we
best study, know, and imagine today’s (and tomorrow’s) knowledge infrastructures?

The remainder of this report summarizes the intense
discussions that ensued. It highlights the issues we believe will be most
salient for at least the next ten years — i.e., a set of research questions
urgently in need of study — and discusses the tools and methods we will need.

[1]The workshop organizers
deliberately decided to bypass the problem of definition, instead allowing the
phrase “knowledge infrastructure” to serve as a suggestive provocation. This
report adopts a similar strategy, though it provides numerous pointers to the
burgeoning literature in infrastructure studies.